REVIEW: U Sad, Bro? 

Frat life takes a lucrative—and criminal—turn

Among the Bros: A Fraternity Crime Story by Max Marshall. Harper, 2023. 304 pp., $30.00

Max Marshall’s Among the Bros: A Fraternity Crime Story is a true-crime exploration of a “multi-million-dollar drug ring” run by fraternity brothers at the College of Charleston. The story is filled with hazing, Xanax and other drugs, the rise and fall of young dealers, wasted youth, and even a murder. 

The main character is Mikey Schmidt, who becomes a serious drug dealer during his time in Kappa Alpha. The book also gives a significant amount of space to his close friend and fellow-dealer (though much better student) Rob Liljeberg, and to Patrick Moffly, a young man involved in the scene who was shot and killed. The ring that Mikey and Rob were running was busted in 2016 with over $21 million worth of pills. When the police finally got interested enough to act, Mikey went to jail but pretty much everyone else went on with their life. 

Max Marshall was well-positioned to write this book. A freelance journalist who has written for Texas Monthly, Sports Illustrated, Esquire, and The New York Times, he is only slightly older than his subjects. He graduated from Columbia University in 2016, and he was in a fraternity as well.

On one level, the book is a frightening look inside the world of fraternities. This isn’t just about Kappa Alpha. The hazing rituals at many fraternities are still sometimes extreme, despite all the negative public attention. Many fraternity brothers not only practice but take pride in some crazy things. Marshall includes a story of someone proudly recounting being waterboarded as part of his initiation process as something that bonded him to his peers forever. In Among the Bros, we see that young men from privileged backgrounds still party and wreck campgrounds and mistreat young women and often don’t face serious consequences. None of that is thrilling or unfamiliar.

The book is also about drugs. College drug use is of course also familiar, but there are features we might not expect if we are over thirty. Drugs today are not only sometimes more potent and serious, they are used differently. College students are consuming vast amounts of Xanax, often all through the day, living blacked out without actually blacking out. That is exacerbated by the fact that young people mix (“stack”) drugs more now than before. The bros are essentially roofying themselves more often than others. Those pills are not just coming from pharmacies and shady cousins, they’re sometimes produced by cheap factories overseas, procured through the dark web or more serious domestic drug networks. The volume simply exceeds the ability of underpaid pharmacy techs to keep up. 

This book is only partly about consequences. Mikey Schmidt is in prison now, but most of the bros involved didn’t do any time. Marshall has stories of plenty of big-time college drug dealers who simply got on with their lives after graduation. What is surprising is that it’s big money these days—the ring at College of Charleston was clearing millions of dollars. There is a dark underbelly to the college experience for many students at some of the best schools. It’s not unique to College of Charleston; it happens in more places than you’d like to think.

Marshall doesn’t render a final verdict on the reasons why this happened at the College of Charleston, but he does make a number of observations about the context and the questions the story raises. As he notes, society seems to have turned away from accepting “bro culture” and the hard partying and bad behavior exemplified in films like Animal House, Old School, and Stepbrothers. Since #metoo and some of the anti-hazing campaigns, we seem to have become more hostile to badly behaving bros. 

Then again, the example of Donald Trump and his supporters seems to suggest a counterargument. What we see in Among the Bros is that plenty of college men are going to continue living like Animal House, whether or not everyone else approves. Most of the young men doing the drugs came from good homes and were graduating to good prospects. Yet there was a multimillion-dollar drug ring in Charleston that could get you LSD (or anything else), and that was mainly run from a single fraternity. 

Though Among the Bros is not explicitly about the crisis of American boys, it is in the orbit of that conversation. Boys are struggling in school at all levels. They graduate high school behind girls and are less likely to attend or graduate from college, law school, or medical school than girls. They struggle in math, reading, and science. They’re not all going into the army or trade school instead. People are worried about it on the left and on the right. This is everyone’s problem. David Brooks considers it a “crisis of men and boys.” Russell Moore is worried about the young men who feel “purposeless and lost.” 

No one seems to know exactly what is going wrong or what we should do about all the young men who are essentially failing to launch. Why are boys having such a hard time? Theories abound. Even “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” people wonder if the system is rigged against boys. No one gets enough recess; everyone gets too much homework—maybe they suffer more for it. It’s possible. Some blame “stupid homework.” Some homework really is stupid, but boys used to be caned for not sitting still in one room school houses and forced to learn Greek and Latin at early ages and somehow many survived and advanced. It’s hard to believe that previous generations of boys could handle Latin conjugations and ours cannot handle math worksheets.

But maybe that’s an unfair comparison because so many fewer boys (and girls) would be spending quite so many years in school as they do now and doing so much work. Maybe if a higher percentage had to deal with the education of the 1800s in the 1800s, fewer would have made it through. Girls also hate “stupid homework” but more often manage to do it. That may be partly because they are raised to be more compliant. The system isn’t better for them, but they’ve been better conditioned for it.  

Some think the crisis of boys and men is more metaphysical. It’s long been observed that the Western world now largely lacks coming of age and initiation rites. Maybe boys especially need those things to become men. Some argue that our society is against men and masculinity, that it is a hostile environment for those willing to embrace their own testosterone. This is also hard to square with our surroundings. Men dominate politics and business and succeed even in the fields where women have more graduates. Almost no one cared about women’s college basketball until last year. It’s hard to fully embrace the theory that men are being pushed out or that men can’t keep up with competition in school or the workplace. 

Plenty of people are worried about “toxic masculinity,” but some of those people are mostly upset about men like Andrew Tate, who is distressingly popular with young men. One in six boys 6-15 has a positive view of Andrew Tate—it’s hard to argue that all young people are being brainwashed to hate masculinity or being a man. You could argue that they embrace Tate because he’s the only one celebrating being a man, but I think most adult men would agree that Tate and his misogyny do not meet the standard. Many of those most worried about societal trends also seem least secure in their gender identity. And before we blame absent fathers, fathers are more present now than they were in previous generations.

Russell Moore believes that the problem is less with the societal value placed on being a man and more with the lack of correct values being taught to young men (and women). Certainly, the young men in Among the Bros did think of success as money to spend on passions and did not understand membership in a self-sacrificing and other-bettering way. Cutting your bro a deal on drugs is not loving him well. Waterboarding is not the best way to bond. Moore believes we are too often being offered Roman rather than Christian values.

Among the Bros offers us some opportunity to clarify our understanding of the problem. The fraternity brothers in the book were basically disaffected youth. They didn’t worry about wasting their lives. The homework argument seems to suggest boys are faced with too much accountability at young ages, but the parents of these fraternity brothers rarely presented them with consequences for bad behavior—even before college. The bros wanted to go through the day completely numb. They placed little value on their daily lives. Why? They could have done something more vital. The Appalachian Trail is always there to be hiked. They chose unremembered days instead of making memories. Some of them, like Patrick Moffly, seem to have been profoundly sad. Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, which many are talking about, may offer part of the explanation.

Yet there are a million more things we can talk about. What about lack of economic opportunity? It’s hard to buy a house and get a job that will pay off your school loans. It’s hard to be an adult when the economy is keeping you at home. Corporations may be killing the traditional man. What about pornography? In what ways has early and constant exposure reshaped young men in harmful ways? Peggy Orenstein’s book Boys & Sex argues that “boys feel cut off from their hearts.” Maybe kids don’t get enough unsupervised time and don’t get to range far enough. Maybe it’s the chemicals and hormones in our food and the microplastics in our brains. There seem to be unlimited possibilities for explaining the problem. 

What can we conclude? We will not find a singular explanation for this crisis. All the things that people are worried about are probably relevant to some degree and worth addressing. We should also remember that while the problem is everywhere, it’s not every young man who is failing to launch. As Russell Moore reminds us, we all know at least one young man who is remarkable, probably more. 

It’s too easy to complain about younger generations, forgetting how our own aged into maturity. A next step might be to start looking at the young men who are succeeding and start adopting some of the relevant practices from their lives. What is working? We have enough data points on just about everything and everyone in existence to present a model to help us understand what works. We must remember that whatever we learn will do nothing for men and boys if we don’t act on it.

Elizabeth Stice is Associate Professor of History at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Her essays have appeared at Front Porch Republic, History News Network, and Mere Orthodoxy.